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One of the most fulfilling tasks I do on a regular basis is updating my commonplace book. What’s a commonplace book? Simple: it’s a place to store all those quotes, lyrics, poems, passages, etc. that mean something to you.
It’s a way to store all the things you read, regardless of their format, in one place so that you can access it any time you want. The concept isn’t new by any means; people across history have kept some form of a commonplace book. Marcus Aurelius had one that would later be published. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolfe all had one.
Modern authors like Austin Kleon and Ryan Holiday keep one. The formats change based on the person but they all serve the same purpose: a way to keep track of things that mean something to you.
Ryan Holiday has famously used his note card system as the basis for writing his books, something he picked up while working for Robert Greene.
If you want to dive deeper into this system of note-taking, writing, and organizing, read up on the Zettelkasten Method.
Personally, I keep a daily journal and I’ve been using my own version of the notecard system for the past couple of years. However, as I’m heading into my doctoral work this fall as I write, I’m attempting to update my commonplace system.
While I agree there is tremendous benefit in writing things down on paper — I write in my journal by hand in cursive daily — the real power of keeping a record of all the things in your commonplace book is when you can make connections between different entries.
I’ve tried making those connections with my note cards, but it hasn’t worked for me. So I needed to come up with something better. Something digital.
I’ve come up with a two-pronged approach. One of those prongs is this blog you are reading now.
For too many years, I tried to take blogging far too seriously. Always trying to write something meaningful and important while sharing things that I found or learned with the world.
My anxiety (which turns out to be pretty crippling and only in the last year have I really begun to get a handle on it) wouldn’t let me craft those perfect blog posts.
